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Month: July 2018

John Crowley is an underread American writer whose Aegypt series is one of my favorite tetralogies. I am not alone: Michael Dirda has written about it in The American Scholar and Harold Bloom includes it in his Western canon. The quartet consists of Aegypt (reissued as The Solitudes), Love and Sleep, Daemonomania, and Endless Things.

I recently returned to Aegypt, the first novel in the quartet, and loved it. In fact I enjoyed it much more, because the first time I read the books out of order. I began with the last book, Endless Things, because it was widely reviewed in 2007. And then I scrambled to find used copies of the other books. I do not think all were in print then.

Aegypt manages to be one of the most intricate novels of the 20th century, and yet it is also lucid, accessible, and delightfully imaginative. It begins in the late 1970s, but it shifts back and forth in time, even to the Renaissance, and the influence of the 1960s as experienced by the hero Pierce Moffett is powerful. Pierce, a lazy historian who has never finished his Ph.D. dissertation, has been a popular history instructor at Barnabas College in New York. But he has lost both his vocation and teaching job after a mind-blowing affair with a drug-dealing diva. Needless to say, he did not do his best work on cocaine.

Those of us who grew up in the ’60s or ’70s will recognize the experimental history curriculum at Barnabas College. Pierce is encouraged to change the syllabus to accommodate students of the Age of Aquarius. (By the time I was in college, I was so bored by experimental education that I studied classics.). And reading about Barnabas College reminds me not to take too seriously the changing college curricula today. Everything will change again in 20 years to accommodate a generation who will revolt against political correctness.

Crowley writes amusingly of the college in the ’60s,

Barnabas College, like a fast little yacht, had quickly tacked with the new winds that were blowing, even while old galleons like Noate were wallowing in the breakers. Courses in the history, chemistry, and languages of the old everyday world were semester by semester cut to a minimum (Pierce’s History 101 course would, eventually, very nearly reach the present day from time-out-of-mind, even as the 200-level courses, out of his provenance, came to deal chiefly not with the past at all but in possibilities, in the utopias and armageddons that all adolescents love). The old standard textbooks were chucked, replaced by decks of slim paperbacks, often the students’ own choices, they are after all (said Doctor Socrabasco) paying the bills. Veteran teachers faced with this fell tongue-tied or turned coats garishly; young ones like Pierce, his students’ coeval almost, still had trouble facing children who seemed to have come to Barnabas chiefly to be instructed in a world of their own imagining.

And so, having lost his job, Pierce has to find a new job outside of New York, and he can hardly imagine living out of New York. He rides a Greyhound bus to another small college where he has an interview. But when the bus breaks down in the Faraway Hills, he by chance meets his former student Spofford, a Vietnam vet who now raises sheep. And Spofford hosts an outdoor party which has the effervescence of a modern Midsummer Night’s Dream.

And then the next day Pierce learns he doesn’t have a job interview after all–the letter was some kind of automated mistake, sent after someone else was hired for the job. Spofford suggests that Pierce stay and research regional history. But Pierce returns to New York and gets his old teaching job back, partly because he is inspired to try a new line on history inspired by the alternative culture of the Faraway Hills.

A scholar of the Renaissance, Pierce lands a book contract to write an alternative history of the Renaissance dominated by gypsies, myth, astrology, crystal balls, Shakespeare, hermeticism, the Italian heretic Giordano Bruno, and the occultist John Dee. And he refers to the source of this non-traditional magical history as Aegpt, an imaginary country. And of course he moves to the Faraway Hills to write his book.

The other main character, Rosie Rasmussen, has left her husband and moved with her daughter into an eccentric uncle’s house. They run a family foundation, and she is hired to work on some projects, including putting local historical novelist Fellowes Kraft’s papers in order . And she is connected to Pierce through Spofford, who is in love with her, and also through Pierce’s love of Fellowes Kraft. Rosie is escaping from her problems through reading the complete works of Fellowes Kraft which she finds surprisingly good. (I like the excerpts, too, especially the chapters from a novel about Shakespeare’s boyhood.)

And then Pierce discovers a lost manuscript by Kraft about Giordano Bruno, which complements and changes his own work.

Mind you, this book is weird. You’ll be happily reading about one character or another, and then suddenly you’re reading about Giordano Bruno (and I admit I was not entirely fascinated by him). Overall this is a very enjoyable book. But there are many, many threads, and it is not for everyone.

Crowley has a distinctive American voice. He occasionally descends into sentimentality, and I do think that’s an American thing, but he also has an enormous vocabulary and arranges words in beautiful sentences. He is an intellectual who reminds me of Robertson Davies, not in style, but in wide-ranging knowledge of hermeticism. In Davies’ The Rebel Angels (which I wrote about here), Renaissance scholars are scrambling and competing to find documents by Rabelais, and there is much involvement with gypsies, tarot cards, and the occult.

The eclectic Crowley has won an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Literary Award and a World Fantasy Award . This year his novel Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr (which I wrote about here) has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award for best novel. I am rooting for him.

If you have read this mediocre novel, you will wonder why on earth I’m looking for it. My own reaction a decade ago was: “A 400-page poorly-plotted Gothic.” Well, even though it is bound to be disappointing, I am a mad Le Fanu fan. Uncle Silas is my favorite Gothic novel, and so I want to reread The Rose and the Key.

Our books used to be well-organized, even catalogued, but then we had a black mold scare in the study. We packed up our books so the de-molding crew could do its thing, which seemed to be painting the walls. (N.B. The CDC website says there is no black mold menace. All houses have mold, and no link has been proved between black mold and any diseases.)

Well, some of our books are still packed in boxes, so I decided to reorganize them. Our library is so huge that I am doing them bookcase by bookcase, alphabetized by author. Each bookcase has its own A-Z shelves.

Here are some messy stacks on the floor. I wonder if I will ever reread George Meredith’s Evan Harrington.

All right, they’re shelved now. Here is a partial photo of the front of two reorganized double-stacked shelves in one bookcase. Curiously, I have read almost all of them, but I don’t feel the urge to weed these (mostly) classics.

Well, we’re not ready to go on Booktube with this look. Booktubers have spare, tastefully-ordered, often white-painted bookcases. Their books often match! I should do this by color code.

But I didn’t find my copy of The Rose and the Key. Very sad. And reading the e-book is just not the same.

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Oh no, I think as I riffle through the latest novels: is there anything I want to read?

Perseverance has its rewards. I absolutely loved Alice Mattison’s smart, well-written new novel, Conscience. The characters are mature, the structure is brilliantly complex, and Mattison has something to say (so much to say). Told from three points-of-view, Conscience focuses on the consequences of reading, or rereading, a Vietnam-era novel, written by a friend and based on the life of another friend, a conscience-stricken anti-war activist who became a terrorist.

It begins in the present with the musings of Olive Grossman, an editor of crafts books and a biographer of women writers, who says she will never write a memoir, but wants to recall the exact moment of the commencement of a series of painful events. It began, she thinks, when her husband Griff, a high-school principal, asked to borrow Bright Morning of Pain, a novel written by her high school friend, Valerie Benevento. He has always refused to read the book, because it presents a a romanticized view of the actions of their friend Helen, who decided in the ’70s that words and demonstrations were not enough to end the war. And Griff and Olive are both characters in the book, too. Indeed, Olive and Griff separated years ago, partly because of their attitudes toward Valerie’s book. But Olive has been asked to write an essay about it for a magazine, in conjunction with a publisher’s reissuing a paperback with a readers’ guide. When Griff insists it’s time for him to read it, she is flattered.

What I’m saying is that Griff’s need for the book was sexy. It was also something else, though Griff wasn’t talking about Val Benevento’s book that morning as anything more than a book that mattered to me. Griff too had a connection with this book. Some men would have seized it the day it was published, read it, dismissed or condemned it, or become briefly famous discussing their connection to it. Another sort of man would be more comfortable pretending it didn’t matter and could be left unread, and Griff was one of those. This was different—and despite my nervousness, I was curious. Barefoot, I crossed the hall into my study and took my copy of Bright Morning of Pain from the shelf: the hardcover first edition, with its familiar green-and-gold matte dust jacket (green tree, gold lettering, against a blue sky). The paper had soft, frayed edges and a row of tiny parallel tears at top and bottom that looked familiar. I had marked it up—both years earlier when I first wrote about it and later, when I wrote about it again. The older marks were in ink, the newer ones in pencil.

Alice Mattison

But Griff loses the book, and she thinks that he has done it unconsciously on purpose. He says he found it compelling, and that it made him cry. When it finally turns up in the office of Jean, a director of a drop-in center for the homeless, she says she is reading it and doesn’t want to give it back yet. Griff, the president of the board, left it in her office when he went in to use her phone. And he needs to recover the book so he can finish it, but mainly because it has his wife’s notes in it.

Because of the book, they invite Jean to dinner and she becomes a family friend. She is fascinated by the complexity of Griff and Olive’s relationship. She sees that Olive is angry at Griff, and Jean is angry, too, because Griff keeps trying to block new services at the drop-in center, particularly a program that will allow the homeless to sign up for private rooms for an hour or two during the day. Jean and Olive become friends, and Jean sides against Griff on some of the center’s issues. Will the marriage thrive or break? And, dangerously, for Jean is the one radical at the dinner table, she begins to date an inconsiderate younger man, Zak, a doctor Olive’s daughter used to date, and who Jean knows has the ability of causing great grief.

Oddly, Griff was a radical in the ’60s, and believes his own use of a gun at a protest inspired Helen’s using a gun at a bank robbery. He feels guilty, but Olive insists that there was no connection, that Helen had long been involved in radical politics before she knew Griff. And Olive has her own guilt: she spent hours talking about Helen to Valerie when Valerie was doing research for the book. And Valerie sold out Helen, Olive, and Griff.

The compulsive readability of Conscience is slightly reminiscent of two other poltical page-turners, Marge Piercy’s Vida, a fast-paced novel about a ’60s radical who goes underground, and Doris Lessing’s A Ripple from the Storm, a brilliant autobiographical novel about Martha Quest’s involvement with a small communist group during World War II in Southern Rhodesia. Lessing brilliantly captures the mix of excitement and exhaustion: the intensity and dreariness, the analysis and self-criticism, and the daily meetings (usually more than one) at which there is much talk, little action.

I thought about so much when I read Conscience. There are a few faults: occasionally the writing is choppy, but that fits the flexible form of the book. Can a book be great because of the intensity of the content and history? I think it can, and that is the case here.

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My husband caught a cold at the office. I blame it on paper clips, post-its, and office supplies.

And now everyone has it. The city is stricken with the common cold. And I’m surprised there’s not a quarantine.

And so I am coughing and drinking Cold-Eeze and wondering if there’s a yoga pose that will banish the cold. Meanwhile, I’m making a list of novels with memorable scenes of illness. Alas, I cannot remember many scenes with the common cold.

1. In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Bennet catches a violent cold while visiting Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst at Netherfield Park, the home of her future fiance, Mr. Bingley. She becomes so ill that they refuse to let her go home and she sends a letter to her sister Elizabeth.

“MY DEAREST LIZZY,—

“I find myself very unwell this morning, which, I suppose, is to be imputed to my getting wet through yesterday. My kind friends will not hear of my returning till I am better. They insist also on my seeing Mr. Jones—therefore do not be alarmed if you should hear of his having been to me—and, excepting a sore throat and headache, there is not much the matter with me.—Yours, etc.”

2. In Turgenev’s On the Eve, the heroine, Elena, an intense young woman who wants a purpose, falls in love with Insarov, a Bulgarian revolutionary, and educates herself about the cause. Alas, he catches pneumonia, and though he recovers for a time, he does not live long. Elena is heartbroken but she lives to fight another day.

‘Elena!’ sounded distinctly in her ears. She raised her head quickly, turned round, and was stupefied: Insarov, white as snow, the snow of her dream, had half risen from the sofa, and was staring at her with large, bright, dreadful eyes. His hair hung in disorder on his forehead and his lips parted strangely. Horror, mingled with an anguish of tenderness, was expressed on his suddenly transfigured face.

3. In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the hero, Hans Castorp, visits his tubercular cousin at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, and laughs at the easy life-style there before he, too, is diagnosed with TB.

It would not have taken much for Hans Castorp to be seized by another fit of laughter. “What? You lie out on your balcony rain or shine, night or day?” he asked, his voice wavering on the edge.

4. In The Painted Veil, one of my favorite novels by W. Somerset Maugham, Kitty’s husband Walter is furious when he learns she has had an affair. He takes her with him to mainland China, where he must deal with a cholera epidemic. Needless to say no one is safe from the cholera, but Walter and a group of nuns put up a good fight. Kitty wants to help the nuns.

“There is no need to scrub the floors. That is done by after a fashion by the orphans.” She paused and looked kindly at Kittty. “My dear child, do you not think that you have done enough in coming with your husband here? That is more than many wives would have had the courage to do, and for the rest how can you be better occupied than by giving him peace and comfort when he comes home to you after the day’s work? Believe me, he needs tthen all your love and consideration.”

5. I’ve run out of respiratory illnesses and cholera and am on to a zombie novel. There is some beautiful writing at the beginning of Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth:

My mother used to tell me about the ocean. She said there was a place where there was nothing but water as far as you could see and that it was always moving, rushing toward you and then away.

The narrator, Mary, has grown up in a village behind a fence, to secure the villagers from zombies, known as the Unconsecrated, who infect human beings with their bites. After her mother becomes a zombie, Mary becomes an outcast. The Sisters, a group of secret-loving nuns who know the true history of the world, shelter her for a while after her mother “turns”–her mother chooses to become a zombie rather than to die. Although Mary is badly treated by the Sisters, she learns that the nuns have contact with the outside and that a young woman named Gabrielle has come in with news. Is there any hope? Not much.

It was announced in The Guardian today. Ah, the joy of reading, or thinking about reading, the longlist of a famous prize!

Bloggers always support the prize. In 2009, Dovegreyreader and several other bloggers read the complete longlist. I, too, managed to read more than half the list that year, including two I had to order from the UK: A. S. Byatt’s brilliant The Children’s Book (should have won!) and Sarah Hall’s remarkable How to Paint a Dead Man.

I lost interest in the Booker in 2011. The judges chose a number of very violent novels, and I caught hell from a small press for a negative review of an extremely violent book (which is why I seldom deal with the divas of the tiny presses).

This year I’m changing all that. I intend to read half the longlist (half of a half will be sufficient). But it is a bizarre-o list, in that I’ve only heard of three of the books: Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room, Richard Powers’ The Trees, and Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight. And these three are doing very well here, as I imagine they are in the UK.

The big news: Nick Drasno’s Sabrina is the first graphic novel to make the Booker longlist. As my husband says, “That will be this year’s winner.”

Naturally, the British bloggers are annoyed about the three Americans on the list. I say with a hand on my hip: “Deal with it, honey.” For whatever reason, the Man (or Booker or whatever) company is determined to favor Americans. Famous writers have submitted petitions saying
Bring back the British!, and nothing has changed. What’s in it for the ManCo I couldn’t say.

But surely an American won’t win this year, after George Saunders and Paul Beatty’s wins in 2016 and 2017. But of course the graphic novel, Sabrina, is by an American.

And now here is the longlist. Let me know if anything looks good, or if you have plans to read the Booker list. Not all titles are available in the U.S. yet.

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Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right is my favorite novel at the moment, simply because I know it less well than my two other favorites, War and Peace and Villette. And I consider He Knew He Was Right even greater than The Way We Live Now, which is often cited as Trollope’s greatest (see Robert McCrum at the Guardian and John Lanchester at NPR). I almost wonder is there is a man/woman split on these two classics: The Way We Live Now is about finance; He Knew He Was Right focuses on marriage. Mind you, I love both novels almost equally. But I am fascinated by Trollope’s views on the making and disintegration of engagements and marriages In He Knew It Was Right.

In this brilliant novel, the marriage plot is at its thickest. Can two obstinate people have a happy marriage? A seemingly well-suited couple, Louis Trevelyan, a wealthy Englishman, and Emily Rowley, the daughter of Sir Marmaduke Rowley, the governor of the Mandarin Islands, have fallen in love and are engaged to be married. Emily’s mother, Lady Rowley, observes that Louis has one fault: he likes to have his own way.

“But his way is such a good way,” said Sir Marmaduke. “He will be such a good guide for the girls!”

“But Emily likes her way too,” said Lady Rowley.

And that is the crux of the novel. What happens when a strong-willed couple disagree and will not see each other’s point-of-view?

The marriage between Louis and Emily is all billing and cooing at first: they live in an extravagant house in London, and Emily’s charming sister Nora lives with them because the Trevelyans can help her make a good match, i.e., with a rich man. Louis and Emily have a little boy who is the apple of their eye.

Suddenly everything changes. Louis becomes pathologically jealous of the frequent visits of Colonel Osborne, a flirtatious 50ish man who is one of Emily’s father’s oldest friends, as she frequently points out. Emily does think she views the Colonel as a father figure, and he is much too old to be attractive to a woman in her twenties. But she is oblivious of the fact that Colonel Osborne glories in mischief. He caused a rift between another couple, as Louis’s friend Lady Millborough warns him, and the jealous husband took his wife to Naples to get away from him. She asks, Couldn’t Louis just take Emily to Naples? When Louis decides he and Emily must separate, Lady Millborough is appalled. She tries to talk to Emily, but the talk of obedience to her husband does not go over well. Emily says, “And I will obey Mr. Trevelyan–in anything reasonable,”

Louis, Colonel Osborne, and Emily in the park.

Why is Emily so hard to empathize with? She is right, and her husband is wrong. But in the beginning, she carries things so very far. Louis is tormented with jealousy, but she does nothing to assuage it. Even Nora tells her to take a step back, but Emily fusses, argues, and continues to be defiant, writing notes to the Colonel, in which she implies that her husband is being unreasonable. It drives Louis crazy–literally.

And so the couple separate. Their friend Hugh Stanbury (eventually Nora’s suitor) arranges for them to live with his mother and his strong-willed spinster sister, Priscilla, in a nice biggish house in a village. Even here Colonel Osborne cannot leave Emily alone. He enjoys his mischievous flirtation and pays her a visit. There is much gossip in the village after Emily “receives” him, and even Nora is not sure that he should have visited. And the mad Louis, who has hired a detective to keep an eye on her, becomes, if possible, even madder on the point of Emily’s “sins” when he learns of the visit. And Priscilla tells Hugh that things have gone too far, what with the Colonel and the detective and the gossip, and that it is not right for them to continue to live with Emily and Nora.

My inner spinster is almost, if not quite, in agreement with Priscilla. On the one hand, I love Nora (if not Emily), and want them to have a home. I also want Priscilla and her mother to have a nice home: before they lived in a tiny cottage. But all the women are (rightfully) uncomfortable about the Colonel’s visit. Only Emily seems not to notice his transgressions.

Emily has a strong moral code, and as a feminist I agree that she should be able to see anyone she wants. But in a marriage compromises are made, and where there is jealousy someone usually has to bend. Couples do break up due to jealousy, but not over a father’s friend! Colonel Osborne is not worth it.

I do not empathize with Louis Trevelyan, and do not mean to indicate that I do. But Emily is only sympathetic as a mother: her insane husband’s kidnapping of their child is one of the cruellest acts in the history of fiction. One question that is never quite answered is whether Louis’s madness could have been prevented, or whether the mad jealousy would have manifest itself later with someone else. Trollope seems to have regarded the jealousy as inevitable. I am not sure.

This is a rich novel, with a large cast of characters, most more sympathetic than the Trevelyans, and all at the center of a web of engagements (some broken) and marriages (that we hope will be happy). And he is an unusually effective writer. It drives me crazy when people say Trollope’s style is flat. It is simple, unembellished, and seems more modern than that of most 19th-century writers.

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I am rereading He Knew He Was Right, my favorite novel by Trollope. Is this his masterpiece? Well, I am fond of most of his books, but I do think this is one of the greatest Victorian novels.

This is a timeless and unputdownable novel about a marriage that becomes unbearable because of a husband’s pathological jealousy and his wife’s rightful insistence that he has no reason to be jealous. But he knew he was right, and she knew she was right, so the couple separates with disastrous results. But I am equally intrigued by the various subplots (which aren’t quite subplots, because some get equal time) about other marriages being made, especially a worldly young woman’s reluctant falling in love with a penny journalist. If only she could bring herself to marry the rich Mr. Glascock! And what about the two spinsters pushing thirty who are both courting the affections of the vicar?

This is my fourth reading, but knowing the outcome makes no difference to the pleasure.

I started HKHWR last week after finishing Cousin Henry (which I wrote about here) and smugly planned to finish the 800 pages today.

Turns out it is 930 pages, so my calculations were wrong.

Meanwhile, you can read an essay aboutHe Knew He Was Right at the TLS, “Reading Trollope in the Age of Trump.”

I don’t mind you thinking me a scaremonger. Scaremongering has a respectable history. The fact that we’re still here after so many prophecies of doom doesn’t, to my mind, prove the prophets were mistaken – only that the worst hasn’t happened yet. That state of “savage torpor”, for example, into which Words­worth saw the “discriminating powers of our mind” descending – did he get that so wrong? Wrong about the torpid, maybe. We are too hectic to be torpid. We troll, wear trainers and fulminate. But is “savage” so wide of the mark? Wordsworth was describing what made his age unpropitious to poetry. Need I state what makes our age unpropitious to the novel?

2. Obama has posted his Summer Reading list at Facebook. He writes, “This week, I’m traveling to Africa for the first time since I left office – a continent of wonderful diversity, thriving culture, and remarkable stories.” And he lists six books by African authors, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

I love art and illustration. My childhood obsession with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood led to hours with art history texts. I’d need a fortnight just to properly do the Met. And so I love it when SFF books engage with art and culture, providing insight into the history of the world, their aesthetic, and their values. There are plenty of literary works revolving around art, and artists, but SFF provides a number of stories where art matters—to the story, to its society, and to its character.